With the advent of broadband networks and high end video encoding methods, video applications have dominated the digital world. There are varied applications available in the market to facilitate ease, entertainment, and flexibility to users. The varied applications include, but are not limited to, IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), Web conferencing, video calling, and multimedia messaging. These services promise greater user satisfaction in terms of high QoE (Quality of Experience) for end users. QoE is a better metric than QoS (Quality of Service) in encapsulating user perceived quality of any services and thus helps service providers improve their services by providing precise measurement of user satisfaction. These services are not only facilitating but also demanding in terms of high end infrastructure, precisely orchestrated technology, and sufficient resources to deliver quality services and user perceived QoE.
One drawback of the highly demanding nature of these video applications is their dynamic behavior in performance and dependence of their quality of services on the current network resources and conditions. The current network resources and conditions keep on fluctuating depending on different physical and virtual parameters. This dynamic nature produces service problems or issues, including deferred transmission in IPTV, blurred images in TV and web based video calling systems, discontinuity in telecast or transmission, and transmission of damaged frames or video sequences. These problems or issues severely impact the QoE, and users have to contact their service providers to rectify the errors. These problems or issues not only hamper the user experience with video, but is also annoying because users themselves have to contact service providers physically for each of the problems or issues.
Different scenarios and conditions may lead to these problems or issues. For example, in an IPTV system, the users have to report online or via phone any connection problems they have with their subscriptions; in a Web conferencing system of an enterprise, a company has to contact the vendor for any technical glitches in performance of audio/video telephony; in an Internet service provider system, the users have to report and then wait for optimal bandwidth allocation to their connection for video application usage.
While these problems or issues cause discomfort in terms of reporting, the physical feedback loop involving a human interface takes much more time to resolve the problems or issues by taking appropriate remedial actions. Sometimes, the delays in services may range from hours to days. Occasional or periodic feedback inquiry from service providers is unable to cure the problems or issues because of two reasons: (1) involved user interaction is cumbersome for end users and (2) the time slot is too big to capture the instantaneous fluctuations in the network services.